Michael Field

Abstract

The allure of the connection between literature, journey and the sister arts interlaces with the endeavours of human beings and with the act of writing about it, of transforming it into a story and sharing it with others (Pantini 1999). The poems included in the collection Sight and Song (1892) by Michael Field, male pseudonym of authoresses Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper, not only manage to celebrate the affiliation between literature and the figurative arts, but they also become a verbal representation of the visual art, namely of that ékphrasis deemed to be as an exchange between visual and textual cultures. In this analysis, the revolutionary ekphrastic inspiration of the two authoresses will validate the possibility of observing art and reality in a different way and translating it into poetic texts so as to allow the rise of that political capability of subverting Victorian identities and social hierarchies.